The New Yorker in the Forties

Gap-toothed and spiky-haired, Harold Ross arrived in New York after the Great War and soon became one of the city’s most fantastical characters. He was twenty-seven, an eccentric searcher shaped by a dropout youth in the American West and a knockabout start in the news business; before he enlisted, he’d worked for two dozen papers, some of them for no more than a few weeks. Ross had a lucky war. He battled the Germans by editing Stars & Stripes in Paris. When he landed in Manhattan, he took up residence in Hell’s Kitchen and went to work for a veterans’ publication called The Home Sector. He also worked for a few months, in 1924, for Judge, a Republican-funded humor magazine. In the meantime, he acquired a circle of young Jazz Age friends (he played softball with Harpo Marx and Billy Rose, shot ducks with Bernard Baruch) and conceived an idea for a fizzy Manhattan-centric magazine of his own—a “fifteen-cent comic paper,” he called it. For financial backing, he hit up a baking and yeast scion named Raoul Fleischmann. Ross never really liked Fleischmann (“The major owner of The New Yorker is a fool,” he once wrote; “the venture therefore is built on quicksand”), but Fleischmann gave him the wherewithal to lure artists and writers from his accumulating circle of friends, hungry freelancers, disgruntled newspapermen, and Broadway lights. Harold Ross was in business.

From the moment he published the first issue of the magazine, in February 1925, he became one of midtown’s most talked-about characters. He was the profane rube who had a mystical obsession with grammatical punctilio and syntactical clarity. He was the untutored knucklehead (“Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?” he famously asked) who lived on unfiltered cigarettes, poker chips, and Scotch and yet somehow managed to hire James Thurber and E. B. White, Janet Flanner and Lillian Ross, Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. He could not afford to pay Hemingway’s short-story rates, and so—with the guidance of a fiction department led by a cultivated Bryn Mawr graduate named Katharine Angell (later Katharine White)—he went about discovering John O’Hara, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, and Shirley Jackson. His editorial queries (“Were the Nabokovs a one-nutcracker family?”) got to the heart of things.

Ross was in on the joke of his bumpkin persona, and later became its captive, a lonely, twice-divorced workaholic. But he marshaled that persona to lead, to cajole, to set a tone at the magazine that was high-minded in its studied lack of high-mindedness. Ross had the sort of editorial personality that caused his deputies and writers to weep, sometimes in despair, sometimes in gratitude. One day, he would send a note saying “WRITE SOMETHING GOD DAMN IT.” And then, on the occasion of good work, he would send a message reading, “I am encouraged to go on.” It was all in the service of the weekly cause. He was nothing if not clear. To break up his first marriage, he sent his wife a kind of editorial memo that left no doubt of her faults and his own. Thurber took a crack at portraying the man in “The Years with Ross,” and Wolcott Gibbs wrote a play, “Season in the Sun,” with a directive that the actor playing the Ross character ought to be able to play Caliban or Mr. Hyde “almost without the assistance of makeup.”

The richest and funniest portrayal of Ross and the day-to-day affairs of The New Yorker, however, resides in his letters, which were edited, expertly, by his biographer, Thomas Kunkel. Those letters reveal the inner life of Ross—the irascibility, the devotion, the single-mindedness—and the evolution of his idea for the New York-based weekly. “Let the other magazines be important,” he said throughout the twenties and thirties. Ross was determined to keep things light, to publish fiction, humor, reviews, artwork, and reporting that avoided heaviness, pretension. His models included Punch, the British publication known for its cartoons, and Simplicissimus, a satirical German weekly. He disdained the quarterlies, academia, and analysis—the genre known to him as “thumb-suckers.” He prized shoe-leather reporting, vivid observation, absolute clarity, and conversational tone. He preferred a limited circulation (with expensive ads) to a mass audience. He wanted a magazine that was more stylish than Life, more upscale than Collier’s, more timely than Vanity Fair.

Ross was not an especially political man. His racial views were retrograde, even for the times. He tended toward isolationism. When forced, he said, “I’m a liberal, though, by instinct. Human, you might say, and a meliorist by belief.” But politics and polemics were not in his early plans for the magazine; he intended to enjoy the Jazz Age, not sing the blues of impending crash. Editorially and commercially, he had conceived The New Yorker for the city’s “sophisticates,” a silvery, elusive sensibility that was defined, particularly in those prewar years, by an aloofness to the troubles of the world. The magazine’s dominant visual artist at the time was Peter Arno, an East Coast aristocrat, who, in his covers, portrayed the Depression, when he portrayed it at all, as a mild joke.

Ross’s letters, particularly in the magazine’s first ten years, show little concern about money and the Depression, except where it concerns the complicated financial arrangements he had with his ex-wife or a drop in ad pages. Two financial subjects do seem to thrill him: the successful investment he made in Chasen’s, a smart-set restaurant in Los Angeles built by the vaudevillian Dave Chasen, and the hiring of editorial talent—particularly Katharine Angell, who raised immeasurably the ambitions of the fiction department, and William Shawn, who came to work on “fact” pieces and eventually led the magazine for three and a half decades. On the whole, standards of rectitude and taste, sometimes in the form of puritanical reserve, were more on his mind. In one prolonged letter, he has the energy to debate with E. B. White about the use of the phrase “toilet paper,” for instance, which Ross finds “sickening.” (“It might easily cause vomiting,” he insists. “The fact that we allow toilet paper to be advertised, under the name ‘Satin Tissue,’ has nothing to do with this matter.”) You can read your way through countless letters and think that the Depression did not exist; it hardly cast a shadow on The New Yorker. When James Agee and Walker Evans went off to investigate poverty in rural Alabama, it was for Fortune.

There were those who noticed The New Yorker’s determined detachment. “In the class war The New Yorker is ostentatiously neutral,” Dwight Macdonald wrote, in a 1937 essay for Partisan Review called “Laugh and Lie Down.” “It makes fun of subway guards and of men-about-town, of dowagers and laundresses, of shop girls and debutantes.… Its neutrality is itself a form of upper class display, since only the economically secure can afford such Jovian aloofness from the common struggle.” On September 6, 1940—one year after the Nazi invasion of Poland; six weeks after the magazine finished running St. Clair McKelway’s unflattering Profile of Walter Winchell—Ross posted a confessional on the bulletin board that seemed to echo Macdonald’s point.

MEMO TOThe New Yorker STAFFSeptember 6, 1940

In the interests of avoiding possible embarrassment, I would report that I was kicked out of the Stork Club last night, or asked not to come in again (suavely), because the sight of me causes distress to Mr. [Sherman] Billingsley, the proprietor—something I’m doing my best to take in my stride. It’s because of the Winchell pieces. I don’t know to what extent Mr. Billingsley’s aversion extends into this organization, but it certainly includes McKelway.

That’s not to say that Ross or his magazine was oblivious to the accumulating catastrophe. Ben Yagoda’s fine history of The New Yorker, “About Town,” scrupulously points out the signs of belated awareness: in 1939, Rea Irvin published a portfolio of drawings called “A Nazi History of the World.” At the end of the year, Frank Sullivan, in his Christmas verse “Greetings, Friends!,” included the couplet “Lebensraum he wants? So! Well, / Let’s hope he gets it soon, in hell.” The next year, Christina Malman drew a haunting charcoal cover of armed German soldiers watching over a long stream of downtrodden prisoners, many wearing hats, some wearing skullcaps.

Still, the magazine did not figure out how to respond fully to such events until the forties. This anthology represents The New Yorker’s great turn, its journalistic, artistic, and political awakening. When the global conflagration began, Ross—to the surprise of his readers and even of some of his staff—proved himself prepared.

In journalism, if not in world events, Ross could be prescient. He told Janet Flanner, as she was about to sail for France, “I don’t want to know what you think about what goes on in Paris. I want to know what the French think.” In those days of stubbornly dull and ritualistic news reporting, this amounted to revolutionary counsel. Ross was, in effect, asking Flanner to rely on observation and her own intelligence and voice; questions of form were up to her. In January 1940, he told A. J. Liebling, who was cooling his heels in France, waiting impatiently for a battle, “For the time being, I say mark time, and be prepared for excitement if it starts.” He gave much the same advice and freedom to many other writers—Mollie Panter-Downes, John Hersey, E. J. Kahn, Jr., John Lardner, and Rebecca West among them—as they set off on their assignments. He put the right players on the field, gave them enormous leeway, begged for copy—and when the time came they produced coverage of the war that was unmatched.

It is hard to overemphasize how fresh The New Yorker’s voices in the forties were compared with what was in most other magazines and daily newspapers. The singular “house” voice, E. B. White, wrote with the alarm of his readers. White’s Notes and Comment piece on the occasion of the Nazi march on Paris captures the sense that the world was out of synch, the danger not so far from home:

An hour or two ago, the news came that France had capitulated. The march of the vigorous and the audacious people continues, and the sound is closer, now, and easier to hear.

To many Americans, war started (spiritually) years ago with the torment of the Jews. To millions of others, less sensitive to the overtones of history, war became actual only when Paris became German. We looked at the faces in the street today, and war is at last real, and the remaining step is merely the transformation of fear into resolve.

The feeling, at the pit of every man’s stomach, that the fall of France is the end of everything will soon change into the inevitable equivalent human feeling—that perhaps this is the beginning of a lot of things.

(White’s were typically the first pieces that readers encountered in each week’s issue, and a contribution of his opens each of the sections in this volume.)

Ross was not eager for the United States to enter the war, but his personal views were hardly the point. He dispatched one writer after another into the bottomless story, so much so that there were hardly any staff members left at 25 West Forty-third Street. Ross and Shawn and the rest worked nights and weekends to make their deadlines. They faced paper rationing. Circulation increased, but the circulation department collapsed under the weight of the draft. Ross feared that he would lose Shawn, and was relieved only when Shawn was exempted from service because he and his wife, Cecille, had a son. “The New Yorker is a worse madhouse than ever now,” White confided to his older brother, “on account of the departure of everybody for the wars, leaving only the senile, the psychoneurotic, the maimed, the halt, and the goofy to get out the magazine.”

What built the new reputation of the magazine was a string of pieces including Janet Flanner’s Profile of General Pétain, Liebling’s dispatches from all over Europe, and Hersey’s exclusive about a young officer named John F. Kennedy and his exploits rescuing his crewmates on the PT-109. When the Navy and Kennedy’s father, Joseph, tried to get Hersey’s piece moved from The New Yorker to the larger-circulation Reader’s Digest, Ross was uncompromising. He wrote to Joseph P. Kennedy, “All of these goings-on led us to believe that we were more or less being chivvied around by a bunch of heavyweights, and since we have long had a feeling here that we are kicked around a great deal by the big fellows, or in behalf of the big fellows, we were not disposed to lay down now.”

As the journalism deepened, the popularity of the magazine broadened. Between 1941 and the end of the war, in 1945, circulation went from 172,000 to 227,000. Some of that popularity was due to a free, pocket-size “pony” edition of the magazine that was distributed to men and women in the service. It was a marketing boon; many of them bought subscriptions when they came home.

The war made The New Yorker. And Ross knew it, even if the knowledge was tinged with regret. He feared pretension and self-importance almost as much as he feared a dropped comma. The second half of the forties was less tumultuous but no less transformative. The American Century, long predicted in jingoistic terms by Henry Luce, Ross’s bête noire, took shape. Postwar prosperity infused New York—and The New Yorker—with a greater sense of commercial and artistic ambition. The trauma of the war, too, was reflected in the stories of Salinger and Shaw and Nabokov. And despite his fear of pretension, Ross became less self-conscious about the life of the mind; Edmund Wilson was, notably, given the freedom to write about whatever captivated his interest, from the rites of literary culture in postwar London to the customs of the Zuni in New Mexico.

After the war, Ross was so exhausted, so worn down by his editorial struggles and his contentious relations with Fleischmann, that he threatened to resign. And yet, as the country settled into its great boom, he grew accustomed to more ordinary battles over galleys and page proofs and seemed to take a wry and renewed pleasure in them. “There is nothing to be done about [Edmund] Wilson’s editing that I know of,” he wrote to Katharine White. “He is by far the biggest problem we ever had around here. Fights like a tiger, or holds the line like an elephant, rather.”

When there were other battles to be fought, more serious ones, Ross was never fainthearted. Liebling, E. B. White, and Lillian Ross all wrote strong pieces about the more virulent forms of anti-Communism. (The FBI accumulated a file on Liebling, calling him a “careless journalist of the New Yorker set” and responsible for “the pinko infiltration of The New Yorker.”) Ross, without making much of it, stood by them all.

By the end of the decade, The New Yorker was flourishing, but Ross was a wreck. He suffered from ulcers, lung ailments, and general exhaustion. He was increasingly ceding authority to Shawn. In 1951, he wrote to his friend the writer Howard Brubaker, “I started to get out a light magazine that wouldn’t concern itself with the weighty problems of the universe, and now look at me.” By the end of the year, Ross was dead. The fifties at The New Yorker were left to the men and women he had nurtured, hectored, cajoled, flattered, berated, agitated, mystified, and, yes, inspired.

David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.